Nokia Lumia 920 review

The Lumia 920 is the first Nokia phone to run on the new Windows Phone 8 operating system -- and it just happens to be the Finns' latest hero handset, with a standout screen, dual-core processor, eight-megapixel camera and a feast of Nokia extras.

It's on sale now for around £495.

Design and performance The Nokia Lumia 920 is not a phone you're likely to miss, decked out in colourful livery (it's available in yellow, white or red, though there's also a plain ol' black version). And it's big -- at 11mm thick and a hefty 185g in weight it's going against the skinny grain, and certainly feels much chunkier than the latest iPhone, which comes in under 8mm.

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The casing is a single piece of soft-touch polycarbonate with gently curving edges and no access to the battery. The SIM card pops into an iPhone-style covered slot on top, but as with other Windows Phone devices, there's no option to beef up the 32GB of onboard memory with a microSD card, even though WP8 now supports these. There's also 7GB of free online storage via Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud offering, which is a pretty good deal.

The 4.5-inch screen sits behind a covering of tough Gorilla Glass and delivers an extremely sharp resolution of 1,280x768 pixels. That's a higher resolution than the last version of Windows Phone could handle, and higher than the iPhone 5's 1,136x640. With Nokia's ClearBlack technology delivering very high contrast, even tiny website print looks clear without the need to pinch to zoom, and colours are bright and generally accurate, without the steroids-like enhanced vibrancy of Amoled screens. It's capacitive, but you don't need to touch it with your skin -- even with gloves on it's still very sensitive.

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The dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor backed by 1GB RAM may not sound too impressive next to the quad-core shenanigans of the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the soon-come Google Nexus 4, but it really couldn't be very much faster in use. As we've come to expect from Windows Phone, apps are very fast to start up, browsing is swift and painless, and HD movies play with silky smoothness. It's 4G capable too, so super-fast downloads and browsing could be yours if you're on EE and in the right area.

OS and Apps As we saw recently on the HTC 8X, Windows Phone 8 has given the OS a few updates, fixed a few issues and made a few cosmetic changes, but it's not a toot and branch redesign of the OS. It still has the Start screen that you can populate with the tiles of your choice. Some of these are dynamic and show information or pictures, such as the People tile, which constantly shifts through a mosaic made up of pictures of your contacts. The active tiles are a simpler and tidier version of Android's widgets (something that you don't get on the iPhone at all) and there are now three size options for some of these active tiles too, which gives you more options for how you use them.

The Me app makes it easy to keep on top of all your social obligations. You can set up groups and share messages, pictures and videos with whoever you like. This is backed up by Rooms, which allows you to set limits on who sees what when you're sharing.

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Kids Corner is also new with WP8 and allows you to quarantine sections of the phone, so your child can play games, but can't access your email or alter any settings.

Local Scout does a bit of a Google Now and offers dynamic information depending on where you are, including the nearest shops, restaurants and places of interest.

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Microsoft Office is on board, making your phone into an effective workstation, able to create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs.

Maps and City Lens

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As well as the new stuff from Microsoft, Nokia has a few unique apps of its own that make this a handset worth checking out. Nokia Maps is here and you don't have to rely on a data connection while you're using them -- you can download them direct to your phone.

Nokia Drive offers free turn-by-turn navigation -- something you won't see on other WP8 handsets like the HTC 8X.

Point your camera at a street scene, and Nokia's City Lens augmented reality app uses map and local info to display info about what you're seeing -- the quality of results you get will depend on the popularity of the street, but it's fun to use and is likely to get better.

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Nokia Music is also free and allows you to create playlists that you can stream as well as download up to 14.5 hours of tunes to carry around with you for offline playback. There's also Nokia Mix Radio, the free service that lets you stream or download a selection of themed tracks from a cache of 17m. It's not quite Spotify Premium, but it is free. There's no FM radio though.

One chink in the Windows Phone armour is its Marketplace app store, which is pretty thinly populated compared to the Apple and Google alternatives. They've got 700,000+ apps each, while WP still only has a bit over 100,000 -- still, it has many of the most popular, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Skype, but there's no iPlayer.

Power and cameras

The 902 is one of the first phones we've seen with built-in wireless charging. You'll need to shell out for a £55 charging pad from Nokia, but with the pad plugged into the mains, you simply rest the phone on it and it will charge automatically by magnetic induction. We've seen this technology before on the PowerMat and other devices, but they generally require an adaptor or a special case for each phone -- this makes it much easier and intuitive, if not particularly cheap.

The 8.7-megapixel camera uses the same PureView technology we saw in the Nokia 808 -- the one with the 41-megapixel camera which Nokia produced just to show it could. It has a good quality Carl Zeiss Tessar lens with a fast f/2.0 aperture and a dual LED flash but is a bit light on features. As with other WP8 cameras, there's now the option to add software features to the camera with "lenses". In this case there's the Bing Vision barcode scanner, plus SmartShoot, which allows you to remove blurred or moving elements in a posed picture (people walking past in the background, for instance).

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There's also CinemaGraph, which lets you create moving .gif images within a picture, so it looks a bit like those newspaper pics from

Harry Potter. Despite the lower pixel count, it delivers sharp, clear pics with good colour balance and little in the way of artefacts, so long as you have decent light. It can record full HD 1080p video at 30fps and the front-facing camera can do 720p HD.

Despite the large 2,000mAh battery, the 902 didn't deliver very well on power, barely making it through a full day of admittedly fairly intensive use. The battery's fixed too, so you can't carry a spare.

Conclusion Microsoft maintains such a tight hold on the specs for Windows Phone that the WP8 experience is going to be very similar, whichever handset you're using. However, the bundled free apps from Nokia, as well as the excellent screen and speedy processor all give this handset the edge as the best WP8 handset so far.